Teleconferencing is a convenient way to allow people in various geographic locations to discuss various matters. Teleconferencing has numerous advantages because it allows for the sharing of ideas and information without the time, expense, and effort required with physical travel, which can be quite substantial if a meeting includes numerous participants from various parts of the world. Typically, teleconferences are arranged by providing a group of people with a telephone number for the conference and perhaps a pass code that they can use to enter the conference, where the number and pass code are the same for all participants. When conferences are initiated in this manner, it is easy for anybody who has the number and passcode to join the conference and listen to the conversation. In certain situations, this may not be desirable, for example, when confidential or otherwise sensitive information is being discussed. Moreover, users joining in and out at different times and at will sometimes cause disturbance to the channel and breaks the flow of the ongoing conversation.
In other situations, teleconferences are not productive if certain people are not in attendance. For example, a teleconference may be useless if a manager of the attendees is not present. As another example, if a board of directors of an organization is meeting via teleconference, it may be unproductive to hold a teleconference if a quorum, as defined by the bylaws of the organization, is not present. As yet another example, a meeting among different departments of an organization may require a representative from each department. In these and other situations, it is often more productive to reschedule the teleconference than attempt to hold the teleconference without key attendees.
Moreover, verification of whether key members are in attendance can be quite cumbersome. For instance, different attendees may have different ideas of who is regarded as a key attendee and, therefore, the time of many individuals may be wasted during discussions over whether the teleconference should proceed. Also, simply verifying who is in attendance often requires someone to ask, via the conference, who is in attendance or input a certain key combination in order to hear a list of attendees, the audio for which is generated by a user saying his or her name. Not only is this cumbersome, often one or more people will join a teleconference and then attend to other matters, such as stepping out of the room to go to the restroom, until the meeting begins. In addition, systems that provide a list of attendees using an audio recording of a name given by an attendee does not adequately protect against attendees providing fake names. In this case, it can be difficult to actually verify whether that person has joined the teleconference.